Remembering Carmen (6 page)

Miss Watersmith, her white hair disordered as if she had been caught in a stiff gale at sea, smiled welcomingly at them, her veined and knobbled hands gripping tightly a light aluminium Zimmer frame. She looked like a benign little bishop about to deliver a sermon from the pulpit. She wore a loud orange dress of delicate silk which must have been quite a hit in 1947. She cocked her head in the direction of the front room which opened off to the right.

“I'll be with you in a moment. Do make yourselves comfortable. Mrs Meredith has been so kind and laid out our coffee things. If you could be so kind as to pour us all out some coffee, Mr...”

“Wilson.”

“That would be most kind. I am afraid that I take such a long time to complete anything these days.”

And then she laughed (having moved about three feet into the room):

“But time, contrary to the conceits of the poets who would see me hastening to the grave, is what I seem, these days, to have in abundance. I can happily spend half an hour getting up to consult a dictionary for one word. When I was young I seemed to have no time at all. We lived, you know, in such an unconscionable whirl. We were so
fast
. But now I am inundated with time. The days are so long. And Charon and his dark boat are nowhere to be seen.”

They laughed a little too enthusiastically.

“I expect you have come to hear me prattle about my days with Virginia. That's what they all seem to want to hear now. It's an awful thing to say but I didn't really like her at all. She was so bluestockingy, and such a wicked gossip. That was the thing I didn't like about that set. So malicious in their gossip. It really wasn't necessary. I think that they didn't really care for ordinary human kindness. There was something cold and brittle about them all. But oh, so immensely clever and so witty and so entertaining when they wished to be. I expect we would all be the poorer without them.”

Miss Watersmith had reached her high chair, transferring herself thither with a neat, pleasant little movement from the support of the Zimmer which remained parked in front of her. Christopher brought her a cup of coffee and another to Carmen. The Woolf anecdotes had been milked dry by previous expeditions up the dandelion-pocked drive. Carmen had already explained that there was nothing more to be had there. She intended to focus on the novel but her editor expected at least a few scraps of gossip that weren't already stowed in the cuttings file.

“Yes it's quite extraordinary,” Lavinia continued. “To think that my little book should be given another outing and so late in the day. It was considered quite a controversial novel at the time of course. Compared to what one reads today or sees on the television it no doubt strikes you as very tame indeed. But even my buried hints at love between women were too strong for some stomachs. The moral reprovers are so good at picking up the merest hint of sexual unorthodoxy. I think their minds must dwell on it a great deal. When I look at it now I think perhaps that I made it too sentimental. The heroine is rather a drip, don't you think?”

As Carmen swung into action at this prompt Christopher began to withdraw his camera from its bag with the wily circumspection of a bagsnatcher. Lavinia looked across at him and waved her assent with a little playful gesture of the hand. He started to move around the room, waiting for the decisive moment. He was half listening to her talk.

“Of course we saw Mosley rather differently in those days. He was quite dashingly handsome and so many people felt in the 1920s and the 1930s that things were in such a frightful muddle that some stronger medicine was needed. The traditional prescriptions hadn't really worked. I suppose he offered a solution of sorts. With the benefit of hindsight we can see it was all wrong of course. But hindsight is something you never have at the time. I sometimes wonder if we don't need something a little more forceful now with all these dreadful strikes and so forth.”

Carmen skilfully drew her Fabian heroine away from these jagged black rocks towards a calmer expanse of untroubled water. It was the Sapphic seam that she had been instructed to mine. “Politics are a complete turn-off for readers at the moment,” her editor had warned her.

Christopher continued his prowling around the room like a child playing a game of hide and seek. He was reasonably confident that he had collected a sufficient number of revealing and/or quirky shots around which Carmen's text would wrap itself like a well-managed vine.

Eventually, Carmen concluded that she would get no more juice from this wrinkled lemon and stood up with, it seemed to Christopher, an unnecessary brusqueness. They offered to gather up the coffee things but Lavinia waved away their gesture.

“Mrs Meredith will deal with all that later. I don't know what I would do without her. She's Welsh, but very nice.”

They retreated down the camber of her drive with their idiot smiles flashing like warning lamps. Back in the herbaceous street they conducted a quick post-mortem.

“You didn't get to the story about Virginia Woolf's knickers and the Henley Regatta?” he queried.

“If that anecdote gets another outing the public will scream.”

They left Great Malvern in good spirits. The outcome, however, would be brutally disappointing. The piece was set up on screen yet spiked peremptorily by a new features editor who swept into the office on her first day determined to establish her authority by a casual show of violence. Carmen's profile was the first blood-sacrifice of the day. By then it was too late to offer it around to those few broadsheets who cared sufficiently about mid-twentieth century literature, all of whom either had decided Watersmith was an obscure relic or had commissioned their tie-in pieces already. Their little joint essay eventually found a home in a badly-produced literary quarterly emanating from North Shields where it appeared fourteen months later.

Carmen came back from Nice in a state of shock. That terrible business finished for the time being her affair with Jimmy (though a breeze would stir the embers into flame once or twice more). It was an accident. She found it hard to see that it could have been avoided, even if they had been more vigilant, less absorbed in each other. Even the parents of the dead child seemed to accept that this was so, blaming themselves, in spite of the protestations of Jimmy and Carmen, for not exercising more care over their precious child. She would wake, shaking, seeing the whole scene replayed with preternatural vividness, reliving its terror, night after night. Until, of course, it began to fade, slipping back into that repertory of casual horrors that the system of nightmares keeps for future use.

Christopher, towards whom she felt she had behaved so monstrously, was marvellous. Knowing nothing of what had happened and therefore freed from the need to express the usual fatuous reassurances, the sentimental clichés, he merely waited for her, listening, avoiding comment, allowing her to say what she needed to say, however halting and self-contradictory and exhausted her utterance. Carmen had gone straight back to him. He suspected that her deliberate vagueness about her reasons for going to Nice – a refusal that was not unusual between them, so fiercely did they cling to their freedom – covered something that would turn out to be painful for him. Perhaps for that reason he drew back from interrogating her, from seeking to know more. She decided not to come clean, saying only that she had witnessed a dreadful accident whilst staying with an old friend. She was sure that he was unconvinced by the detail but it suited him to go along with the general tenor of her explanation.

But something irrevocable had happened. Not-
withstanding the freedom of their relationship, its absence of shackles and demands, an important barrier had been breached. Carmen had been seriously dishonest with Christopher. Deceit had now entered their mutual existence like a virus. Their life together would never be the same again. Perhaps that point can be identifed as the start of the process which led to its dissolution. If so, she considered that she had only herself to blame. But on those occasions when they had talked in the past – in the most general terms – about ‘relationships' they had agreed that chance plays the greatest part and that the course of an involvement can often seem pre-destined, our own ability to steer it, to rescue it from disaster, turning out to be quite limited. In short, no one is to blame. No doubt a very convenient philosophy for some partners.

Carmen agreed to Christopher's suggestion that they take a fortnight in Greece. It was a way of avoiding morbidity – or the possibility of an approach from Jimmy for whom she was not ready – and it proved a success. She was drawn back to Christopher. They were closer during that fortnight than they had ever been. It is true that she was troubled by her deceit. She could not say to him just why he meant so much to her at that time. Her renewed affection for him was triggered by a remorse that could not be confessed but which, in some sense, she felt sure he understood. They gave themselves to the immediate moment, something that it was rarely possible to do in their London lives – they were so bound up with calculating self-interest and ambition. As Carmen lay on that raked, pebbled beach she turned over in her mind again and again the direction her life had taken and seemed likely to take in the future. It is not unusual, she felt sure, for people to consider that their lives have taken a wrong turning, even when they are decked in the livery of apparent success. She tried to impose a shape on what had already happened: the precocious student, the heroine of the neatly measured-out wild period, the reformed, promising post-graduate, then the reaction against an academic career, the pursuit of metropolitan success. To say that she was not satisfied misses the point. No one in her world, she considered, believed that they were satisfied. Indeed, the restless, manic energy, of those media trades was driven by unease, by a desire to break out from something unspecified into something else even more impalpable. Yet at the same time it was the continuous process that possessed Carmen and her colleagues. She would nonetheless gladly have changed places, taken up something more radically fulfilling. The problem was that she did not have the first idea what that desirable avocation might be.

After they returned Carmen resolved to take some small measures of amelioration. She would devote herself at least to the odd assignment that bespoke quality. That was what prompted her to take Christopher with her as photographer on the doomed assignment, whose chaotic outcome was one that she might have been able to predict. She went quickly back to her bright trash. To her dismay, she discovered she was getting better at it. The commissions came in such profusion that she was working harder than ever. She even won an award sponsored by a hairspray giant.

One evening Carmen was rung by an old friend. The call came as she sat with Christopher at an aluminium table set up outside an Italian coffee shop in Wardour Street. He joked that it was another of her lovers. She said sweetly that she did not usually choose her own sex. She and Alice met two days later at a restaurant in Southampton Row.

Alice had always been striking, but now she seemed to Carmen to have reached that level of casual perfection that one associated with legendary French film actresses who have discovered the means of outwitting time. She was dressed in the very simplest outfit of black which you knew instinctively (without being remotely able to guess at the house of couture which had sold it to her) to be very expensive. Her movements, her way of holding herself, gave away her profession. Carmen had always wondered how Alice survived in it. The model agencies seemed now to prefer anorexic waifs, street kids, the calculatedly dishevelled. Alice, a reprehensible twenty years older than these new fashion magazine icons, belonged to an older school of studied elegance. Even that word now rang a little false. But she was still in demand. There remained certain products which traded on a more traditional image of female beauty. She was just young enough, and just elegant enough, to appeal to the classier end of the market. She was also utterly without illusion. She knew that her days were numbered, that cool aplomb was one thing and that wrinkles, the resistless decay of the flesh, were another.

Carmen had assumed that, being in London briefly from her Paris base, Alice had been at a loose end and wanted simply to catch up with an old friend. But as they talked it became clear that something else was worrying her. The main course had barely arrived when she began to broach her real agenda.

“Did you know I was thinking of packing it all in?”

“But why? I thought you were at your peak. I must have seen you seven times going down the escalator at Green Park the other day.”

“Oh God, that jewellery they made me wear was ghastly.”

“Rather Versace, I thought.”

“Don't mention that name in my presence.”

“Is this a case of quitting while you're ahead?”

“Not exactly, but of course one has to be careful not to overstay one's welcome on the billboards.”

“Then it's something else. I can't help noticing you've been silent on our usual topic.”

“Oh, the love-life is still the same.”

“I bet it is.”

“Don't believe anything you read in the media about G____.”

“So what's the new departure? Don't tell me you're writing a novel.”

“Oh, Car, credit me with some IQ.”

“Then what is it: revulsion at the shallowness of the fashion industry? But you were revolted by it before you even took your first trip along the catwalk.”